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Ogden Point Breakwater in Victoria, BC, Vancouver Island, Canada, 2024

Longtime Slashdot reader neoRUR shares a report from Game Developer: EA Sports FC and Battlefield publisher EA has been taken private by an investor consortium led by Saudi Arabia's sovereign Public Investment Fund (PIF). The move means the U.S. juggernaut is no longer a publicly-traded entity and is now majority owned by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia through its PIF investment arm. Other investors include Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, the latter of which was established by U.S. president Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The $55 billion transaction was financed via a combination of cash from PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners as well as roll-over of PIF's existing stake in EA -- constituting an equity investment of approximately $36 billion. Notably, $20 billion of debt financing was provided by JPMorgan Chase Bank. The deal cleared the necessary regulatory hurdles in July, paving the way for its completion at the close of trading on August 4, 2026. It was approved by regulators in major markets such as the European Union and the United States without incident, despite lawmakers and union leaders in the U.S. calling on the Federal Trade Commission to heavily scrutinize the leveraged buyout over geopolitical and employment concerns.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has capped the number of open bug-bounty reports researchers can submit after being flooded with low-quality and sometimes entirely fabricated vulnerabilities generated by AI. MacRumors reports: The Financial Times learned of the limit after cybersecurity startup Bynario used ChatGPT to locate more than 50 macOS bugs in three weeks. Bynario found a privilege escalation exploit that could let an attacker get unrestricted access to a Mac, but was unable to report it because Apple limited the number of bug reports Bynario could submit. Bynario sent eight reports to Apple in 2025, and another five in 2026 before hitting a restriction.

Bynario's founder said it is a "very difficult time in the industry" because companies are being "flooded by the sheer amount of bugs." Apple has since been in contact with Bynario and is reviewing the company's submissions. While Apple now has a cap on the number of open submissions a researcher can have, researchers can request an increase to make sure Apple's security team doesn't miss a critical vulnerability.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Australasian Darter
Anhinga novaehollandiae
Anhingidae
Description: The Darter is a large, slim water bird with a long snake-like neck, sharp pointed bill, and long, rounded tail. Male birds are dark brownish black with glossy black upperwings, streaked and spotted white, silver-grey and brown. The strongly kinked neck has a white or pale brown stripe from the bill to where the neck kinks and the breast is chestnut brown. Females and immatures are grey-brown above, pale grey to white below, with a white neck stripe that is less distinct in young birds. The Darter is often seen swimming with only the snake-like neck visible above the water, or drying its wings while perched on a tree or stump over water. While its gait is clumsy on land, it can soar gracefully to great heights on thermals, gliding from updraft to updraft. It has a cross-shaped silhouette when flying.
Distribution: In Australia, the Darter is found from Adelaide, South Australia, to Tennant Creek, Northern Territory and then to Broome, Western Australia. it is also found in south-western Australia, from Perth to Esperance. Worldwide, it has been thought of as one of two mainAnhinga species (the other, A. anhinga, is found in North America), found in the southern half of Africa, Madagascar, Iraq, Pakistan, India, south-east Asia, Indonesia and New Guinea. However, A. melanogaster is now considered to be further divided into three species, with rufa being found in Africa, melanogaster in south Asia and novaehollandiae in New Guinea and Australia (the Australasian Darter).
Habitat: The Darter is found in wetlands and sheltered coastal waters, mainly in the Tropics and Subtropics. It prefers smooth, open waters, for feeding, with tree trunks, branches, stumps or posts fringing the water, for resting and drying its wings. Most often seen inland, around permanent and temporary water bodies at least half a metre deep, but may be seen in calm seas near shore, fishing. The Darter is not affected by salinity or murky waters, but does require waters with sparse vegetation that allow it to swim and dive easily. It builds its nests in trees standing in water, and will move to deeper waters if the waters begin to dry up.
Feeding: The Darter catches fish with its sharp bill partly open while diving in water deeper than 60 cm. The fish is pierced from underneath, flicked onto the water's surface and then swallowed head first. Smaller items are eaten underwater and large items may be carried to a convenient perch and then swallowed. Insects and other aquatic animals, including tortoises, may also be eaten, as well as some vegetable matter. In hot weather, adult birds may pour water from their bills into the gullets of their young chicks when they are still in the nest.
Breeding: The Darter is usually a solitary bird, forming pairs only while breeding. Breeding is erratic, happening whenever water levels and food supplies are suitable, but most often occurs in spring and summer. Nests are usually solitary, but Darters may nest within loose colonies with other water birds that nest in trees, such as cormorants, spoonbills and ibis. The male decorates a nest-site with green leafy twigs and displays to attract a mate, with elaborate wing-waving and twig-grasping movements. The male carries most of the nest material to the nest-site, which is normally in the fork of a tree standing in water, usually about 3.5 m above the water's surface. Both sexes complete the nest, incubate the eggs and raise the young. Chicks are kept warm by brooding continously (or cooled down by shading with spread wings) for up to a week after hatching and both adults stay in the nest with the chicks overnight. In hot weather, the adults will even shake water over the chicks after a swim. Chicks can swim after about four weeks in the nest and start to fly at about 50 days.
(Source: www.birdlife.org.au)

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© Chris Burns 2026

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This image may not be copied, reproduced, distributed, republished, downloaded, displayed, posted or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying and recording without my written consent.

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Jeanine John Taele allegedly took photos and videos of property days before president’s visit

Los Angeles county sheriff’s deputies arrested an armed California man over the weekend who was seen surveilling Donald Trump’s golf course in Rancho Palos Verdes, days before the president was set to arrive there for an event with the Republican National Committee (RNC).

Plainclothes federal agents reported Jeanine John Taele, 38, as a “suspicious individual”, after they observed him on Sunday taking photographs and videos of the golf grounds, located in a coastal town south of Los Angeles, according to county officials.

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• Former world No 2 would like golf to ‘go back to old times’ if LIV folds

• ‘I’d hate to see it go away,’ Australian says of rebel tour

Cameron Smith wants LIV Golf to survive but if it doesn’t, he would “100%” return to the PGA Tour.

“I mean, if it was the only option, I think that’s where everyone would want to ⁠be for sure, 100%,” the Australian former world No 2 said ahead of this week’s LIV Golf New York event. “It would go back to old times.”

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Piece of SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket weighing four tonnes will hit the lunar surface on Wednesday at 5,400 miles per hour

A four-tonne piece of a SpaceX rocket that has been floating in space since last year is set to unintentionally crash into the moon at high speed on Wednesday, a collision that poses no danger to Earth but will leave behind a new lunar crater and afford an opportunity for further scientific research.

The ​school-bus-size object is the second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that had launched a lunar lander from Firefly Aerospace toward the moon in January 2025.

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AMD has posted strong second quarter results and forecast even better future financials once its Helios rack systems and Instinct MI400-series GPUs reach buyers. “In data center AI, the growing number and scale of Helios and MI450-series deployments position the [datacenter] business for significant growth in the second half of the year, with growth accelerating in 2027,” CEO Lisa Su told investors on Tuesday during the chip design company's Q2 earnings call. “We now expect data center segment revenue to more than double year over year in 2027,” she added. Yet, despite reporting Q2 profits surging 163 percent year-over-year on revenues of $11.5 billion, and several multi-gigawatts worth of Helios commitments from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta in the bag, Wall Street isn’t buying it. The company's share plunged 10.5 percent after its results announcement, before settling 8.7 percent below opening price at the time of publication. The apparent cause for concern: AMD's growing exposure to the AI bubble. Much of the company's growth potential across both CPUs and GPUs is tied to AI adoption by a handful of companies that are yet to prove they can operate profitably. On Tuesday's earnings call, Su attempted to assuage investor fears, but in the same breath she said the quiet part out loud. “When we talked about the large frontier-model companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, they will be consuming through a number of CSPs,” Su said. “There are additional customers or lots of customers who are interested in Helios at, let's call it, a more regular scale than gigawatt scale.” In other words, while AMD can sell plenty of GPUs, most are sold to a handful of customers. And while other entities have AMD on their shopping lists, they don't buy in bulk. Microsoft, another flagship customer for AMD's latest generation of AI picks and shoves, serves both OpenAI and Anthropic, while Meta is reportedly looking to enter the GPU cloud biz itself. Despite this, AMD remains optimistic about its prospects over the next few quarters. It's not hard to see why because since the launch of its MI300-series GPUs in late 2023, AMD has established itself as the most credible alternative to Nvidia. At its Advancing AI event in San Francisco last month, the company showcased a new rack-scale compute platform called Helios packing 72 Instinct MI455X GPUs each with 432 GB of HBM4 memory on board. On paper, the system meets or beats the performance of Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform on most metrics. The Reg explored these chips in greater detail here. AMD is also eager to cash in on demand for CPUs to power agentic AI sandboxes, which Su anticipates will be the biggest growth driver for Epyc sales before long. Also unveiled at Advancing AI, AMD's Venice Epycs will offer up to 256 cores and 512 threads with support for 16 memory channels at speeds of up to 1.6 TB/s per socket. However, the CPU market isn't the duopoly it once was and AMD now faces its traditional foe Intel, plus new competitors such as Nvidia, Arm, Qualcomm, AWS, Google, and Microsoft. Nonetheless Su remains bullish about AMD’s prospects. “Whether it's server CPU, datacenter, AI, or our embedded business, and our PC business, we see them all benefiting from the AI tailwinds,” Su said. It seems the AI tides will lift all chips, but let's not forget that tides rise and fall. In any case, while AMD’s embedded division is doing quite well with revenues topping $977 million, an increase of 19 percent over this time last year, things aren’t looking so hot for the House of Zen's gaming and client computing divisions. While client PC sales were up 23 percent YoY to $3.1 billion during the quarter, AMD warns that the ongoing RAMpocalypse is likely to cut into PC sales over the next few quarters. Meanwhile in gaming, the end of a console sales cycle is hitting AMD hard on semi-custom processor orders, with gaming revenue down 31 percent during the quarter to $779 million AMD's datacenter and AI sales teams therefore get the job of delivering the company's Q3 forecast which calls for revenues of $13 billion plus or minus $300 million. ®

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